Don Imus

[Sueven]

............... ok

[kyoukan]

I bet they don't support the troops at all either. What other stupid fucking conservative talking head pundit catchphrase can we use to describe them?!

[Arborealus]

Nappy Headed Hos?

Oh wait that's taken...

[noel]

Jason Whitlock on the firing of Imus/Black 'leadership':

Time for Jackson, Sharpton to Step Down
Pair See Potential for Profit, Attention in Imus Incident
By JASON WHITLOCK
AOL
Sports Commentary

I’m calling for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the president and vice president of Black America, to step down.

Their leadership is stale. Their ideas are outdated. And they don’t give a damn about us.

We need to take a cue from White America and re-elect our leadership every four years. White folks realize that power corrupts. That’s why they placed term limits on the presidency. They know if you leave a man in power too long he quits looking out for the interest of his constituency and starts looking out for his own best interest.

We’ve turned Jesse and Al into Supreme Court justices. They get to speak for us for a lifetime.

Why?

If judged by the results they’ve produced the last 20 years, you’d have to regard their administration as a total failure. Seriously, compared to Martin and Malcolm and the freedoms and progress their leadership produced, Jesse and Al are an embarrassment.

Their job the last two decades was to show black people how to take advantage of the opportunities Martin and Malcolm won.

Have we at the level we should have? No.

Rather than inspire us to seize hard-earned opportunities, Jesse and Al have specialized in blackmailing white folks for profit and attention. They were at it again last week, helping to turn radio shock jock Don Imus’ stupidity into a world-wide crisis that reached its crescendo Tuesday afternoon when Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer led a massive pity party/recruiting rally.

Hey, what Imus said, calling the Rutgers players "nappy-headed hos," was ignorant, insensitive and offensive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians.

Imus’ words did no real damage. Let me tell you what damaged us this week: the sports cover of Tuesday’s USA Today. This country’s newspaper of record published a story about the NFL and crime and ran a picture of 41 NFL players who were arrested in 2006. By my count, 39 of those players were black.

You want to talk about a damaging, powerful image, an image that went out across the globe?

We’re holding news conferences about Imus when the behavior of NFL players is painting us as lawless and immoral. Come on. We can do better than that. Jesse and Al are smarter than that.

Had Imus’ predictably poor attempt at humor not been turned into an international incident by the deluge of media coverage, 97 percent of America would’ve never known what Imus said. His platform isn’t that large and it has zero penetration into the sports world.

Imus certainly doesn’t resonate in the world frequented by college women. The insistence by these young women that they have been emotionally scarred by an old white man with no currency in their world is laughably dishonest.

The Rutgers players are nothing more than pawns in a game being played by Jackson, Sharpton and Stringer.

Jesse and Al are flexing their muscle and setting up their next sting. Bringing down Imus, despite his sincere attempts at apologizing, would serve notice to their next potential victim that it is far better to pay up than stand up to Jesse and Al James.

Stringer just wanted her 15 minutes to make the case that she’s every bit as important as Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma. By the time Stringer’s rambling, rapping and rhyming 30-minute speech was over, you’d forgotten that Tennessee won the national championship and just assumed a racist plot had been hatched to deny the Scarlet Knights credit for winning it all.

Maybe that’s the real crime. Imus’ ignorance has taken attention away from Candace Parker’s and Summitt’s incredible accomplishment. Or maybe it was Sharpton’s, Stringer’s and Jackson’s grandstanding that moved the spotlight from Tennessee to New Jersey?

None of this over-the-top grandstanding does Black America any good.

We can’t win the war over verbal disrespect and racism when we have so obviously and blatantly surrendered the moral high ground on the issue. Jesse and Al might win the battle with Imus and get him fired or severely neutered. But the war? We don’t stand a chance in the war. Not when everybody knows “nappy-headed ho’s” is a compliment compared to what we allow black rap artists to say about black women on a daily basis.

We look foolish and cruel for kicking a man who went on Sharpton’s radio show and apologized. Imus didn’t pull a Michael Richards and schedule an interview on Letterman. Imus went to the Black vice president’s house, acknowledged his mistake and asked for forgiveness.

Let it go and let God.

We have more important issues to deal with than Imus. If we are unwilling to clean up the filth and disrespect we heap on each other, nothing will change with our condition. You can fire every Don Imus in the country, and our incarceration rate, fatherless-child rate, illiteracy rate and murder rate will still continue to skyrocket.

A man who doesn’t respect himself wastes his breath demanding that others respect him.

We don’t respect ourselves right now. If we did, we wouldn’t call each other the N-word. If we did, we wouldn’t let people with prison values define who we are in music and videos. If we did, we wouldn’t call black women bitches and hos and abandon them when they have our babies.

If we had the proper level of self-respect, we wouldn’t act like it’s only a crime when a white man disrespects us. We hold Imus to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. That’s a (freaking) shame.

We need leadership that is interested in fixing the culture we’ve adopted. We need leadership that makes all of us take tremendous pride in educating ourselves. We need leadership that can reach professional athletes and entertainers and get them to understand that they’re ambassadors and play an important role in defining who we are and what values our culture will embrace.

It’s time for Jesse and Al to step down. They’ve had 25 years to lead us. Other than their accountants, I’d be hard pressed to find someone who has benefited from their administration.

Now I'm not black, so my opinion couldn't possibly hold any weight, but that seems pretty spot on to me.

[Trek]

There is another radio jockey, although I forget her name- she is black, and constantly talks about white people in a derogatory way. She even has her own T.V. show. Why is she allowed to make remarks about other races, and Imus isn't? Is it because he is white?

Dude, if you're not even offended enough by what this bitch has to say to REMEMBER HER NAME, how do you expect enough outrage to exist in society to get her fired?

I barely remember a show I didnt like either.....I think its called changing the station. Thats what most of us dumb white folk do

[Sueven]

And that's perfectly fine, but you also don't expect that show to get dropped as a result of your outrage.

[Nick]

Imus getting fired is a totally capitalist, free-market, economic decision. MSNBC and CBS decided that Imus' actions meant that continuing their association with him would no longer be beneficial to their companies. They knew that a large segment of America's population was offended and that this segment's choices in media consumption would be affected by whether or not Imus remained.

BULLSHIT BROTHER

political correctness !=America's population being offended.

What a load of shit.

This was obviously nothing more than a reactionary measure taken by the company that hires Imus to show ALL off America (NOT THE CORE LISTENERS OF THE SHOW) that they "dont like racism" (IE Freedom of speech can be curtailed if you're black enough to cry hysterically about the issue)

Trying to claim this was done on some sort of commercial basis because the listening audience (instead of the wider national possible audience) was offended is fucking moronic, no matter how verbose you happen to be.

I'm not trying to to be a dick, but your argument is too fucking lame to be taken seriously (I will develop this once I'm off this retarded keyboard I find myself typing on.)

[Sueven]

This was obviously nothing more than a reactionary measure taken by the company that hires Imus to show ALL off America (NOT THE CORE LISTENERS OF THE SHOW) that they "dont like racism" (IE Freedom of speech can be curtailed if you're black enough to cry hysterically about the issue)

So their motivation was to demonstrate that they don't like racism? Why might they want to demonstrate that they don't like racism? Might there be a possible economic incentive?

Trying to claim this was done on some sort of commercial basis because the listening audience (instead of the wider national possible audience) was offended is fucking moronic, no matter how verbose you happen to be.

I'm not sure if you're not explaining yourself clearly or if you don't understand what I said, but I actually explicitly said the opposite of this. Allow me to quote myself...

This DOES NOT mean that this group of people would stop listening to Don Imus-- most, but not all, probably didn't listen to him in the first place. It DOES mean that this group of people would be less likely to consume anything produced by MSNBC and CBS, and would frown on companies who choose to advertise on Imus' show, in turn lowering the advertising revenue that Imus was capable of generating.

Basically, Imus might not lose a single listener, but his show would nevertheless be less profitable due to decreased advertising revenue, and CBS and MSNBC as a whole would suffer due to their association with someone who is reviled by a significant portion of their greater audience.

the real issue is the disjunction between the demographics of the audience for the particular program and the demographics of the audience for the company as a whole. Black people might not watch Don Imus, but black people do watch CBS.

The audience which CBS and MSNBC rely on in order to make profit is MUCH broader than the audience of Imus' show. They need to be conscious of the effects of what Imus says on their entire customer base, not simply a small subsection of that base.

Clearly, I'm saying that it's the "wider national possible audience" was the offended party, rather than the "listening audience." Which one of us is misreading the other?

[Midnyte_Ragebringer]

Imus getting fired is a totally capitalist, free-market, economic decision. MSNBC and CBS decided that Imus' actions meant that continuing their association with him would no longer be beneficial to their companies. They knew that a large segment of America's population was offended and that this segment's choices in media consumption would be affected by whether or not Imus remained.

BULLSHIT BROTHER

political correctness !=America's population being offended.

What a load of shit.

He's right. All the polls by all the major networks showed the majority did not agree with Imus being fired. So, the population did not speak. Then again maybe they were working on the electoral college and that way he got fired.

[noel]

Interesting little timeline the WSJ put together:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB ... n_tff_top/

[Sueven]

He's right. All the polls by all the major networks showed the majority did not agree with Imus being fired. So, the population did not speak.

It's not a fucking democratic process. The question is whether the existence of that portion of the population who DID want him fired would cause CBS/MSNBC to lose money if they did NOT fire him. The companies thought so.

Dr. Z agrees with me!

He's gone from his two major outlets. CBS Radio did an assessment of the balance sheet, which is how corporate people adjust their morality, and decided that whatever financial gain Imus might generate in the future would be offset by the loss of advertising revenue, plus image, when Al Sharpton's activism would be felt. If the network would have canned him right away, I'd have been impressed. But while it was deliberating, I heard the whirl and click of the tumblers, the ring of the cash register. Someone else surely will pick him up, because there are always those who tune in to people such as Imus.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/w ... index.html

[noel]

Midnyte, MSNBC doesn't give a shit what the majority of the population thinks. No network does. All they care about is their revenue stream from advertising. If P&G is going to pull their advertising for all of their products from your entire morning lineup because of one show... You're going to pull that show, period.

More Jason Whitlock:

COMMENTARY
Imus isn’t the real bad guy
Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.
By JASON WHITLOCK - Columnist

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.

I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.

But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.

But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

[Midnyte_Ragebringer]

Midnyte, MSNBC doesn't give a shit what the majority of the population thinks. No network does. All they care about is their revenue stream from advertising. If P&G is going to pull their advertising for all of their products from your entire morning lineup because of one show... You're going to pull that show, period.

Aye. I understand it all very well. I'm sickened by how these companies were so weak and caved in to those two extortionists. White guilt baffles me sometimes. Those same companies fend off idiot calls for bans against their products, all the time, because they all know....no ban would ever hold up and last longer than a week.

[Sylvus]

Funny how we're all (and much of the country) discussing this when none of us probably has any idea the actual overall context outside of the articles that popped up on the internets the last week or two. Has anyone here ever actually listened to Imus' show more than once or twice? I know I haven't.

I thought Michael Wilbon had an interesting take on it. (Written when Imus was suspended and not yet fired, I believe)

If calling the Rutgers women's basketball players "nappy-headed hos" was the first deplorable and offensive utterance out of shock jock Don Imus's mouth, there probably wouldn't be a national firestorm over his reprehensible characterization. If this was some rare event, then there wouldn't be organizations lining up to demand he be fired. If this was the first time, or second, or 10th, probably Imus wouldn't have been suspended for two weeks from his syndicated radio show, which is simulcast on MSNBC.

But there's nothing rare about Imus's vile attacks. This is what he does as a matter of course. Imus and his studio cohorts have painted black people as convicts and muggers and worst of all, apes. Not only do they find it funny, they expect everybody else will as well.

This is what Imus has done for years and years, and Viacom and NBC Universal pay him a king's ransom to do it. Imus has been questioned about his tactics over the years, and he says repeatedly and dismissively, "Get over it." He certainly isn't the only morning shock jock doing this, but he's the one whose behind is being scorched now and justifiably so.

Imus is the one who said in 1995 of Gwen Ifill, an accomplished, award-winning black journalist of incredible dignity and grace: "Isn't the [New York] Times wonderful. . . . It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House."

It's Imus who called William C. Rhoden, the veteran Times sports columnist, "a quota hire." Of course, the work, accomplishments or stature of their targets do not matter to Imus and his stooges. He makes fun of former attorney general Janet Reno's Parkinson's disease.

So "nappy-headed hos" wasn't some weak moment of great exception on the Imus show. In 1997, during a "60 Minutes" profile, Mike Wallace confronted Imus and a former producer who quoted Imus as saying he'd hired a staffer to "do nigger jokes." When I mentioned that earlier this week on ESPN's Pardon the Interruption, Imus responded on his show that it simply did not happen -- though I see it in a 2000 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review and had a producer access it through a transcript (also the audio version) on National Public Radio.

Wallace: "You've told Tom Anderson, the producer, in your car coming home that Bernard McGuirk is there to do nigger jokes.'"

Imus: "Well, I've . . . I never use that word."

Wallace: "Tom?"

Tom Anderson: "I'm right here."

Imus: "Did I use that word?

Anderson: "I recall you using that word."

Imus: "Oh, okay, well then I used that word, but I mean . . . of course that was an off-the-record conversation . . ."

Wallace: "The hell it was."

So, you'll excuse me if I dismiss Imus's apology as bogus. He's apologized in the past, told veteran black journalist Clarence Page on the air he would "promise to cease all simian references to black . . . black athletes." That was before Imus went back to the ape references, probably within a week.

Understandably, this has led to a whole lot of folks calling for Imus's head. Personally, I'd rather see Imus have to confront anger, scorn and ridicule every single day. I'd rather see him have to deal with the accusation of being a bigot. I'd rather the criticism come at Imus from every angle, indefinitely, rather than have him slink away to private life.

You'll have to excuse me for not believing a man can utter this brand of filth month after month, then proclaim testily he's not a bigot. Firing, in some ways, would let him off the hook too easily. I'll defend Imus's right to free speech, while pointing out that those of us who find him and his goons contemptible have the exact same right to free speech. I'd rather see Imus squirm in the face of withering criticism than be fired and turn up six months later as some kind of martyr.

I never listened to Imus, and I don't really care one way or the other if he kept or lost his job. I think Jason Whitlock's articles have been pretty good. But if he was habitually spouting off racist remarks and the advertisers who pay his company the money that pays his salary felt that it was going to impact their bottom line and they'd finally had enough, as Sueven has suggested, it sounds like there were plenty of good reasons to get rid of him.

[noel]

I liked the Wilbon articles. The thing I liked most about Whitlock's articles was that he basically calls out the hypocrisy of it all within the black community.

I think I watched Imus like two times for about 20 minutes max. I always wondered why the hell it was on TV. It was horribly boring.

[Nali]

Why don't I remember her name, Sueven? It's because it really doesn't bother me. They are called "shock jocks" for a reason, eh? If I were offended everytime I was called a bitch... well, that would be a lot. My point was simply that this was made into a bigger ordeal than it actually is. Rap -constantly- refers to women (black in general) as "hos and bitches". Why isn't something being done about this? Don't start with the "blabla they are working on it"; that's bullshit. People shouldn't be offended so easily by words. How many of you actually take to heart the insults about yourself on Veeshanvault?

[Tuddi2]

Calling someone a nappy headed ho is adult humor? Oh I get it; racist adults with low intelligence.

Yeah that's Don Imus' fan base in a nutshell.

in midnytes' defence, he never said it was good humor, but i think most people agree that race based jokes should be kept away from children if possible since they could put more meaning into it then they should, adults can giggle at the steriotype and not feel too much about the undertone of the joke that is racism.

that said, i'm not ever sure midnyte was specifically referring to this "joke" as an example of Imus' adult humor.

i feel weird now....

[Midnyte_Ragebringer]

Calling someone a nappy headed ho is adult humor? Oh I get it; racist adults with low intelligence.

Yeah that's Don Imus' fan base in a nutshell.

in midnytes' defence, he never said it was good humor, but i think most people agree that race based jokes should be kept away from children if possible since they could put more meaning into it then they should, adults can giggle at the steriotype and not feel too much about the undertone of the joke that is racism.

that said, i'm not ever sure midnyte was specifically referring to this "joke" as an example of Imus' adult humor.

i feel weird now....

Aye.

[Sueven]

Why isn't something being done about this?

Easy.

because it really doesn't bother me.

Outrage = action.

[Midnyte_Ragebringer]

Imus getting fired was non other than the result of a slow news week. If he said the same thing this week, it would have been brushed over if anything, like it should have been anyway. Too bad.

[Nali]

It was a rhetorical question, Sueven. I could care less about rap. I was stating the fact that rap -does- degrade women, and that people are "outraged" by it.

[Chidoro]

Why isn't something being done about this?

Easy.

because it really doesn't bother me.

Outrage = action.

being a racist anti-semitic media attention whore also = action with these two hypocritical marble mouthed pricks

[Tyek]

petition overview | letter
Tell Citadel Communications: No to Don ImusTarget:Help keep Imus off the air, by sending this message to Citadel CommunicationsCreated by:Paige S.In an interview with the New York Times Thursday, Citadel Broadcasting's chief executive Farid Suleman said that Imus deserved another chance after being fired by CBS Radio for making derogatory comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. The remarks also cost Imus his simulcast gig on MSNBC.

First it is the Rutgers women's basketball team, next it could be your friends or family members, who through no fault of their own, are put in the spotlight due to success in their chosen sport or vocation.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/tell-c ... o-don-imus


Looks like Imus is about to be rehired. This petition made me laugh. OH NO THEY ARE GOING TO MAKE FUN OF MY JOB, WHAT'S NEXT, ARE THEY GOING TO TEASE ME FOR BEING FAT?!!!!!

The guy was wrongfully fired over a bad joke and hysterical over-reaction. He deserves the right to work. Hell people want to let Vick work and he is a convicted criminal (which I agree with, he should be able to work, whether it is in the NFL or not, he should be able to work somewhere, doing something). Of course Sharpton, who in July was quoted as saying Imus had the right to return to work immediately saw the potential for more "donations" and has called for a meeting with Citadel to discuss the issue.